Snorkeling in Gunung Kidul Yogyakarta The Ancient Kingdom of Indonesia

Yogyakarta or Jogja is the favorite travel destination in Indonesia, many local visitors or the foreigners visit this town. Besides Bali, Jogja becomes favorite destination especially for foreign tourists. As an ancient royal city in Indonesia, Jogja has a complete tourist attraction.

The main attraction of this city is the ancestral culture of Mataram kingdom that is still running until now, naturally if the citizens of Jogja is known to maintain good manners and very friendly. Ancient temples such as Borobudur Temple (the largest Buddhist temple in the world) and the temple of Perambanan become the main tourist attraction too in this city.

But do you know if Yogyakarta also has a marvelous natural attractions such as another area of Indonesia that has an exotic panorama. Mountain tourism and the beauty of the beach in Jogja become an unforgettable moment if you visit this town. Starting from a tour in Mount Merapi, swim or rafting on a river that has a clarity of water, surfing the south coast, diving or just snorkeling at the beauty of coral reefs in the southern sea of Yogyakarta.

Ok, just we will discuss about the beauty of the sea in this town, in passed years this city was only relying on Parangteritis beach as a mainstay beach tourist attraction, but now local government has started to open tourist beaches sites that still classified as a virgin beachs. As growing social media, the beach becoming more famous for tourists, its location is in the district of Gunung Kidul, this southern city of Yoyakarta has beautiful beaches such Kukup, Kerakal, Sandranan, Sepanjang, Drini, Indrayanti, Sundak, and many more.. White sand and crystal clear water make more exotic for the beaches.

Our team SplashDive also imagine the beauty of coral reefs in the seabed, We headed to Sundak beach informed by the beach manager as the recommended dive location. Yes the southern coast of Java island is famous for its great waves and strong underwater currents.

So that not all coastal beaches here can be a safe to be dive location, but maybe someday dive location here will increase, considering there are still many unexplored beach locations.

Unfortunately we arrived at the diving location is too late, the sea water is starting to receding, but our passion to explore the beauty of coral reefs in it does not reduce our spirits.

And plunge .. here we come… and yes we are starting to feel the underwater currents that continue to swing .. but it is still in a safe level, our team began to take photos and record it. Yes this is really beautiful but it is unfortunate many coral reefs are damaged, we almost find damaging coral reef in every corner of the dive location.

Oh God .. I’m sorry we can not keep this your beautiful creations.

After we learned, there are several factors that cause coral damage here, the most obvious is human factor, diving location here also opened for snorkeling, most of them just want to enjoy the seabed but do not care about conservation of coral reefs.

Strong underwater currents make them wobble in the water that bring they crash and damage the coral reefs.

It seems that the local managers here doesn’t give any instructions about coral reef conservation to the tourists before they do the snorkeling.

Yes this is a business, but we really hope the management to follow and keep the preservation of the beach, because this is the attraction of the tourists, if all this is broken then the interest of tourism to this region will fade.